Amazon's CEO Shares Top Five Sustainability Initiatives

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and CSO Kara Hurst spoke at New York Climate Week, detailing the company's newest approaches to cutting emissions | Credit: Amazon
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, spoke at New York Climate Week 2024 and discussed five of the company's newest sustainability initiatives - explore them with us

Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, joined his CSO Kara Hurst at Climate Week in New York City to present Amazon’s sustainability strategies to an audience hungry for progress and change.

Amazon Climate Pledge Summit event at Climate Week saw Andy share insights on the company’s actions and goals for reducing its environmental impact, offering a transparent look at Amazon’s progress and the challenges that remain.

From optimising logistics to pioneering green tech, Andy delved into some of the company's newest approaches. Sustainability Magazine analyses them here.

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1. Reducing logistics emissions through fulfilment centre innovations

Facing mounting logistical demands from rapid growth since he became CEO in 2021, Andy acknowledges Amazon’s need to balance expansion with sustainability.

The company recently regionalised its fulfilment network in the United States, creating eight distribution hubs designed to keep products closer to customers.

By shortening the distance that their packages travel, Amazon has cut back on air transport and reduced the miles covered by its delivery vans, many of which now operate as electric vehicles with zero tailpipe emissions.

“Because we’re placing items closer to customers, we’re eliminating some of the air transport, and our vans are travelling shorter distances — some of which are electric delivery vehicles with zero tailpipe emissions,” Andy explains.

The company estimates that this operational shift helped avoid around 16 million miles of travel last year, leading to a significant reduction in delivery-related carbon emissions.

Amazon is increasing the amount of 'fulfilment centres' it has across the globe, in an attempt to make the journey's of its products shorter | Credit: Amazon

2. Embedding sustainability into Amazon’s core operations

At the heart of Amazon’s sustainability drive is The Climate Pledge, a commitment to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 — a full decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s target.

For Andy, sustainability isn’t a side project but a principle embedded within Amazon’s core business strategies.

"When we announced the Climate Pledge in 2019, we didn’t really have a plan on how we’d get there," he says. "We knew how to get a good chunk of the way there, but there’s still a lot of innovation left to happen."

In the four years since the pledge, Amazon has become the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy, with a global portfolio of more than 500 wind and solar projects.

Every senior leader at Amazon has sustainability targets and must account for their progress regularly.

As Andy explains: “You can’t wake up in the year 2038 and decide that you’re going to make this happen.”

Amazon is quickly developing one of the world's largest portfolios of renewable energy projects | Credit: Amazon EU

3. Aligning customer needs with environmental goals

For more than 25 years, Amazon has built a culture around 'customer obsession', yet Andy notes that today’s customers increasingly expect companies to demonstrate environmental responsibility.

“It turns out, of course, most people care about this,” he says. “Our customers care about this, our partners care about this, our employees care about this.”

Andy emphasises that, for Amazon, balancing customer needs with sustainability is both a responsibility and a long-term business strategy, requiring continual adaptations to products and services to meet rising environmental standards.

He adds: “If you want the planet to be inhabitable for our kids and our kids’ kids, we have to make changes.”

Customers are increasingly conscientious when it comes to sustainable purchases

4. Innovating with AI and cloud computing for sustainable solutions

To meet both business and sustainability demands, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has invested heavily in efficient AI solutions.

With the rising use of generative AI — which requires immense computing power — AWS has developed energy-efficient chips such as Trainium and Inferentia.

These purpose-built chips, designed for AWS’ AI clients, help make cloud-based AI more sustainable.

Amazon’s generative AI platform, Amazon Bedrock, also offers a range of pre-trained AI models that customers can customise, adding a layer of flexibility.

“The reality is that moving to the cloud is four times more energy efficient than running on premises,” Andy explains, suggesting that cloud migration could help other companies lower their carbon footprints by avoiding the need for less efficient, on-premises servers.

Amazon, like many companies around the world, is turning to AI and advanced computing to solve its sustainability problems

5. Driving industry-wide change through collaboration and investment

Amazon’s sustainability ambitions extend beyond internal improvements to fostering change across industries.

The Climate Pledge Fund, created to accelerate sustainable technology, has invested in more than 25 companies focused on solutions in green hydrogen, energy storage, low-emission freight and sustainable construction.

These investments, Andy believes, are key to decarbonising high-emission sectors.

He says: "Most of the technology companies have been working hard at renewable energy, and we got there in 2023, but if we want to get to our collective goal, it doesn’t work if just one company gets there. We all have to do it together."

We all have to do it together

Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon

Andy concludes by acknowledging the scale of the challenge for Amazon, a company with one of the world's largest supply chains and annual operational emissions roughly equivalent to those produced by the entire nation of Morocco.

“If you think about what Amazon does as a more industrialised company — the packaging we have, the last-mile transportation, the middle-mile trucking, the ocean freight and the air travel that we do — that is a very different equation and much harder to do.”

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